Led by site manager Jon Gates, the $750,000 effort took more than 31/2 years, including a year of delays forced by the simultaneous restoration of Lee Hall. Saving what remained of its historic fabric meant spending large amounts of both time and cash. Then more than 225 years old, the building suffered not only from age but also from years of neglect. It would have been a pretty amazing sight."Įndview had a much less commanding presence when the city began restoring it in 1996. "Wounded and dying Union soldiers come back from that battle by the hundreds, lying outside on the grounds while they waited to go into the house for surgery. McClellan - the Union commander - stops by late on the afternoon of the 5th during the Battle of Williamsburg. Stuart and the Confederate rear guard as they fled toward Williamsburg. "The federal cavalry came right down that road, chasing J.E.B. "When you think about what happened here, you can see why it was so important to save it, restore and present it to the public," Quarstein says.
But not before both North and South had used the home as a hospital while they struggled for possession of the property on which it stood. Eventually, nearly 60,000 Southern troops would face a Union Army of more than 120,000 soldiers - all within a few miles of his farm.Ībandoned before the Confederates' May 4 retreat, Endview soon became the site of a squatters' colony made up of former slaves. Many of those men bivouacked in Curtis' fields while awaiting orders from the headquarters staff at Lee Hall, Quarstein says. Nor could he and his wife, Maria, have dreamed that he would return in the company of thousands of Confederate soldiers. Yet he remained so prominent that his call for volunteers at the start of the war led the Warwick Beauregards - who held their farewell party on his lawn - to make him their commander.Ĭurtis probably didn't realize, however, that the Union threat from Fort Monroe would bring him back to help man the massive defensive line being thrown up not far from his house along the Warwick River. Like many other Tidewater planters, owner Humphrey Harwood Curtis had to supplement his dwindling income from Endview's played-out fields with a second career as a doctor, Quarstein says. The freshwater spring and nearby crossroads that made it so important then marked it again during the Civil War.
Good history is the key to creating such attractions, Quarstein says, and Endview brings a rich pedigree to an already fertile mix of historic sites and structures.Ĭonstructed in 1769 by one of Warwick County's most-prominent families, the two-story frame house witnessed both a Revolutionary War skirmish and a War of 1812 militia training. There's no question that people will go to see it." "And if that battlefield has period buildings that visitors can see and touch - like they do in Newport News - it's doubly enticing. "If you want to create a low-impact, yet high- return attraction in your community, you start with a Civil War battlefield," Lighthizer says. 1 in Newport News Park, the houses give the city an attraction with a compelling "critical mass," says Jim Lighthizer, president of the Arlington-based Civil War Preservation Trust.Īnd when word gets out to a Civil War heritage audience that already brings nearly 6 million visitors to Virginia each year, the result could be a steady stream of tourists. Linked to Confederate earthworks at Lee's Mill and Skiffes Creek, as well as the site of the Battle of Dam No.
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